Attorney Marketing on Your Schedule

Nobody has any time for attorney marketing. This is partially because attorneys regularly confuse the concepts of client service and time management.

In your law firm you control your own schedule. you may have deadlines and you may have meetings that you need to attend, but when it comes to scheduling your personal time, you are the boss. This is a fact. Yet I see attorneys get bullied into taking meetings with clients at inconvenient times or in locations that require them to give up hours of time in order to travel to and from the meeting.

In this technologically advanced world, there is little reason a meeting should be inconvenient for anyone. Meetings handled via video conference, telephone or webinar are just as effective (in some cases more effective) as meetings that are held in person. You should never need to go to an extreme location to attend a meeting (beyond the initial introduction).

But there is a concept that is more disturbing to me than traveling to a meeting. That is the concept of having my schedule dictated to me by a client.

An Example

This past week, a prospective client was referred to me. I treat all referrals as if the are the most important person I am ever going to meet (because they are). I contacted the prospective client by email and offered some dates and times for a telephone call. The response I received back was that the individual could not meeting with me during the week. This person asked if I could schedule a meeting on a weekend.

The answer is “no”.

First: Weekends are personal time not business time. That’s one of the reasons I own my own firm.

Second: If you are coming to me for help with attorney marketing, and you do not have time for a 30 minute meeting, when will you have time to do the marketing?

There are a couple of lessons here:

Lesson 1: You control your schedule. You make time for things that are important. If you do not make time for me, I must not be too important to you.

Lesson 2: Time management can tell you a great deal about someone. If they try to force you to do something unconventional because of their “schedule” it says something about them. In the case of the story above, it says this person is a slave to someone or something and it says that he will probably not be a great client for me.

You control your time. No matter who you are or where you work. If something is important, not matter what, you will make time for it.